Environment Animals Wildlife A professor kept a pet worm for 20 years. It just set a record. Baseodiscus the Eldest lives a chill life in Virginia. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Jonathan Allen, a biology professor at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, has a very strange pet: a very long ribbon worm () named Baseodiscus the Eldest, or just B for short.

However, limited availability of datasets with wild animals in natural habitats has hindered progress in automated computer vision solutions for long-term animal tracking. Here we introduce BuckT ales, the first large-scale UA V dataset designed to solve multi-object tracking (MOT) and re-identification (Re-ID) problem in wild animals, specifically the mating behaviour (or lekking) of blackbuck antelopes. Collected in collaboration with biologists, the MOT dataset includes over 1.2 million annotations including 680 tracks across 12 high-resolution (5.4K) videos, each averaging 66 seconds and

The newly discovered P. mikazuki is a tribute the famous warrior Date Masamune. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A team of university students in Japan identified an entirely new species of the mighty Portuguese Man O'War . Described in a study recently published in the journal, the creature's distinct features and fearsome venom have earned it a name that honors a famous 16th century samurai warrior. It's easy to mistake the Portuguese Man O'War () for a jellyfish .

OpenAI's CEO explains that its large language model has been misunderstood--and that he's changed his attitude to AGI. OpenAI's August launch of its GPT-5 large language model was somewhat of a disaster. There were glitches during the livestream, with the model generating charts with obviously inaccurate numbers. In a Reddit AMA with OpenAI employees, users complained that the new model wasn't friendly, and called for the company to restore the previous version. Most of all, critics griped that GPT-5 fell short of the stratospheric expectations that OpenAI has been juicing for years.

A new drug usually starts with a tragedy. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Sometimes, high-tech solutions aren't the best way to solve a problem. The US Army apparently came to that realization recently while exploring new methods to deter birds and other "problematic wildlife" from air bases. The military initially considered using Boston Dynamics' dog-like Spot robot to scare off the intruders, but they quickly realized it wasn't fast enough to effectively shoo the critters away. A far more effective--and affordable--solution presented itself in the form of three life-sized plastic coyote decoys mounted on top of toy-sized autonomous vehicles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a panacea for effortlessly solving the planet's environmental problems. AI still sparks passionate and dystopian predictions within some parts of the academic community, especially in the natural sciences. For some, the existence of AI tools means an existential threat to human creativity.10 Concerns about the increasing environmental costs of carbon emissions1 and water use demanded by information and communication technologies are also on the horizon. These viewpoints, however, overlook the advantages of employing AI in biodiversity research.

These magnificent rays are at risk of disappearing due to targeted fishing, being caught as bycatch, and climate change. Scientists at the research collaboration Mobula Conservation are teaming up with artisanal and industrial fishermen to protect them. Also known as "Devil Rays," mobulas are elasmobranchs: a subclass of fish--including sharks, skates, and sawfish--that are distinguished by having skeletons primarily made from cartilage. More than a third of the species in this group are threatened with extinction. Of the nine species of mobulas, seven are endangered and two are vulnerable according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The human cell is a miserable thing to study. Tens of trillions of them exist in the body, forming an enormous and intricate network that governs every disease and metabolic process. Each cell in that circuit is itself the product of an equally dense and complex interplay among genes, proteins, and other bits of profoundly small biological machinery. Our understanding of this world is hazy and constantly in flux. As recently as a few years ago, scientists thought there were only a few hundred distinct cell types, but new technologies have revealed thousands (and that's just the start).